Desert world

Following hard on the heels of yesterday's post, about whether we'd be able to tell if there'd been a technological civilization on Earth tens or hundreds of millions of years ago, today we have a new study in Nature projecting the configuration of the continents 250 million years in the future -- and what that might portend for life.

We've known about the movement of the continents since geologists Harry Hess, Frederick Vine, and Drummond Matthews conclusively demonstrated in the early 1960s that convection currents in the mantle were dragging the tectonic plates along and shifting the positions of pieces of the Earth's crust relative to each other.  Of course, we might have figured all that out thirty years earlier if we'd just listened to poor Alfred Wegener, who proposed what he called "continental drift" to explain such observations as the near perfect fit between the eastern coastline of the Americas and the western coastline of Europe and Africa.  But because such an idea ran counter to accepted geological model of the time, Wegener was laughed out of academia -- literally.  He ended up taking off to Greenland to do paleoclimatological studies of the ice cap, and froze to death in November of 1930, never finding out that he'd actually landed on the truth.

In any case, what all this means is that the current configuration of continents and oceans is only the latest in a continuously shifting tableau, and it won't be the last.  Because we now have a pretty good idea of the motions within the known fault lines, we can run the clock forward and find out where things are likely to be in the future.

And the picture, unfortunately, doesn't look all that great.

The Atlantic Ocean, currently widening, will begin to close up, and by 250 million years in the future all that will be left of it will be two shallow landlocked seas.  Almost all the Earth's land surface area will have coalesced into a single supercontinent, which geologists have nicknamed "Pangaea Ultima" -- a misnomer, as "ultima" means "last" and this isn't the first time this has happened, and it won't be the last.  The thing is, the projection is that this gigantic land mass will be aligned along the equator, one of three factors that are projected to make this a hot time for land-dwelling organisms on planet Earth -- the other two are the carbon dioxide released because of the widespread volcanism predicted to take place as everything smashes together, and the fact that by then, the astronomers are telling us the Sun is going to be 2.5% brighter than it is now.

The geologists are making dire predictions about what this will do to terrestrial life on Earth -- mass extinction being the gist of it.  

"It does seem like life is going to have a bit more of a hard time in the future," said Hannah Davies, a geologist at the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences in Potsdam, who co-authored the study.  "It’s a bit depressing...  There have been extinction events in the past, and will be extinction events in the future.  I think life will make it through this one.  It’s just kind of a grim period."

Well, okay, it'd be grim if you took the species around today (humans included) and teleported them into Pangaea Ultima.  None of us would last very long.  But I'm not quite as pessimistic as Davies is about life in general.  This change to a planet dominated by deserts -- something more like Arrakis or Tatooine than the lush and verdant planet we now have -- won't happen overnight, and it's sudden change that usually triggers mass dieoffs.  Sure, it's likely that there will be a whole different suite of species than there is now, but hell, we're talking about 250 million years, so that was going to happen anyhow.

Give species time to adapt, and they do.  As Ian Malcolm put it, "Life... uh... finds a way."

Now, whether we (or more accurately, our descendants) are amongst those species that make it that far remains to be seen.  Very few species survive for 100 million years, much less 250.  But honestly, right now I'm more concerned with whether we'll get our comeuppance for our rampant pollution, out-of-control resource use, and burning of fossil fuels in a hundred years; let the hundreds of millions of years take care of themselves.

So that's our latest look at a future that really isn't as depressing as the scientists are claiming it is.  Although it's a little sobering to think that our descendants could be the Jawas and Tusken Raiders of the future Earth.  Those things are freakin' creepy.

And don't even get me started about Sandworms.

****************************************

A ruling against slander

Since I spend an inordinate amount of time on gloom, doom, and despair, it should be a refreshing change for loyal readers of Skeptophilia that today I'm bringing you some good news.

You might know the name of Michael Mann, the climate scientist whose "hockey stick" graph back in 1998 sounded alarm bells amongst the scientifically literate regarding the perils of climate change.  His research used proxy records such as bubbles in ice cores to track the global average temperature over the past few thousand years, and the alarming upward trend just in the last hundred was a significant wake-up call.  Mann, who runs the Earth Systems Science Center at Pennsylvania State University, has since that time been a vocal advocate for taking steps to mitigate global warming.

Climatologist Michael E. Mann [image courtesy of photographer Greg Grieco and the Wikimedia Commons]

He has also been the target of not just criticism, but harassment.  He has been the victim of dozens of spiteful attacks despite his standing in the scientific world -- he was one of the lead authors of the "Observed Climate Variability and Change" chapter of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Third Scientific Assessment Report in 2001, was the organizing committee chair for the National Academy of Sciences' Frontiers of Science conference in 2003, was named by Scientific American as one of fifty "leading visionaries in science and technology," and has received numerous awards and honors including the Hans Oeschger Medal of the European Geosciences Union in 2012.

But such credentials, and the obvious sterling quality of his research, doesn't stop ideologues who are determined to tarnish the reputation of anyone who dares to disagree with their rhetoric.  The National Review and the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, have been especially vicious in their attacks.  But they seem to have crossed a line with a series of articles that accused Mann of falsifying research -- and, along the way, compared him to Penn State football coach and convicted child molester Jerry Sandusky.

Mann fought back, and took the National Review and the Competitive Enterprise Institute to court.  And late last week, a judge in the Washington D. C. Court of Appeals ruled in favor of Mann.  The judge's decision, in part, reads:

To the extent statements in the appellants' articles take issue with the soundness of Dr. Mann's methodologies and conclusions -- i.e. with ideas in a scientific or political debate -- they are protected by the First Amendment.  But defamatory statements that are personal attacks on an individual's honesty and integrity and assert or imply as fact that Dr. Mann engaged in professional misconduct and deceit to manufacture the results he desired, if false, do not enjoy constitutional protection and may be actionable... If the statements assert or imply false facts that defame the individual, they do not find shelter under the first amendment simply because they are embedded in a larger political debate.

The case will now be remanded to a lower court for trial.

Mann was elated by the decision.  "We are particularly pleased that the court, after performing an independent review of the evidence, found that the allegations against me have been 'definitively discredited,'" he said.

Mann has for years been on the front lines of this battle.  He's received death threats over his research -- hard to imagine, but if you consider the dogmatism of the opposition, not to mention the corporate profit motive behind it, it's unsurprising.  In a December 16 op-ed piece in The Washington Post, Mann writes:

I’ve faced hostile investigations by politicians, demands for me to be fired from my job, threats against my life and even threats against my family.  Those threats have diminished in recent years, as man-made climate change has become recognized as the overwhelming scientific consensus and as climate science has received the support of the federal government.  But with the coming Trump administration, my colleagues and I are steeling ourselves for a renewed onslaught of intimidation, from inside and outside government.

So Mann's victory in the Appellate Court is good news, but the war is far from over.  We have an incoming administration that appears poised to stall any forward motion on dealing with the causes and effects of climate change, and in fact is giving indications of disbelieving that it's even occurring.  Mann writes:

We also fear an era of McCarthyist attacks on our work and our integrity. It’s easy to envision, because we’ve seen it all before.  We know we could be hauled into Congress to face hostile questioning from climate change deniers.  We know we could be publicly vilified by politicians.  We know we could be at the receiving end of federal subpoenas demanding our personal emails.  We know we could see our research grants audited or revoked. 

I faced all of those things a decade ago, the last time Republicans had full control of our government.

The people who understand science, and who are not in the pockets of the fossil fuels industry, need to be ready to fight this when it happens.  Not "if;" I think Mann is exactly correct that we're entering another era of science denialism and corporate profits über alles.  But Mann himself is far from giving up, and neither should the rest of us.  As Mann puts it -- the future of the Earth itself hangs in the balance.

We're in for a spell of weather...

Why is it that some people will believe anyone's pronouncements on anything, as long as said person is not a scientist?

I and others have ranted repeatedly about a large slice the public's dismissal of climate science and evolutionary biology.  And the anti-science stance of each of those, I know, comes from a different source; the petroleum lobby's power over the political system in the first place, and religion in the second.  But this general distrust of anything scientific runs deeper than that, touching on topics where there is no obvious motive for disbelief, where people for some reason will accept folksy tale-telling over evidence-based, data-driven research.

And that makes no sense to me at all.

As an example of this, let's consider The Old Farmer's Almanac, which just came out with its predictions for the winter last week.  And based on their methodology, which as far as I can tell involves voodoo and rain dances, we're going to have a wicked snowy winter.

"The snowiest periods in the Pacific Northwest will be in mid-December, early to mid-January and mid- to late February," the Almanac says, which at least has a better chance of being correct than their predicting a blizzard in, say, July.

But the fact is, no scientist takes what the Almanac has to say seriously, because their weather forecasting isn't science. According to an article in Consumer Reports, the Almanac bases its predictions on "a secret mathematical formula using the position of the planets, tidal action of the moon and sunspots" that is kept in a black tin box in Dublin, New Hampshire.

Because that's gonna be reliable.

And how accurate is it, anyway?  Skeptical blogger Steven Novella found one place where someone actually tested the Almanac's predictions, and guess what happened?

In the October 1981 issue of Weatherwise, pages 212-215, John E. Walsh and David Allen performed a check on the accuracy of 60 monthly forecasts of temperature and precipitation from The Old Farmer’s Almanac at 32 stations in the U.S.  They found that 50.7 percent of the monthly temperature forecasts and 51.9 percent of the precipitation forecasts verified with the correct sign.  These may be compared with the 50 percent success rate expected by chance.

This is my "shocked face."

But what pissed me off the most about this year's predictions was an article from KOMO News Online called, "Who to Believe?  Snowy Farmer's Almanac?  Or NOAA's Warm El-Niñoey Blob?" written by, of all people, a trained meteorologist who therefore should know better.  And while author Seth Sistek concludes that we should probably trust NOAA, which has forecasted a warmer-than-average winter for the northern United States because of a blob of anomalously warm seawater parked off the Pacific Coast of North America, even the fact that he asks the question gives unwarranted legitimacy to what honestly is a bunch of hocus-pocus.

[image courtesy of NOAA]

"[I]n the battle between Blob and book," Sistek writes, "I'd have to lean toward the Blob in agreeing with the supercomputers that it'll be a warmer winter."

Which, as endorsements go, is not exactly knocking my socks off.  What's next?  Asking the astrologers to draw up zodiac charts to predict solar flares?

Okay, I'm coming off as pretty harsh toward The Old Farmer's Almanac, I realize.  But the problem is, there's already a tendency in this country for people to buy pseudoscience over science, to distrust researchers, to look at scientists as ivory-tower nerds who are disconnected with practical reality.  We definitely don't need anything to push us further in that direction, even if it is "all in fun." To quote Novella again:

I hear many people quoting one almanac or the other about what kind of winter we are in for. They don’t seem to realize that the almanacs are using 200 year old pseudoscientific methods that have never been validated.  Despite the coy marketing of these predictions, many people take them as legitimate... 

It seems that the public did not want the scientific information – they wanted the predictions made by mysterious methods.  I can understand, for marketing reasons, why future editors of the almanac would not consider dropping the predictions.  But here is a recommendation – why not get rid of the two century old dubious methods and replace them with the climate forecasts made by the National Weather Service?

Because, apparently, folksy prognostications still carry more weight than actual science with a large sector of the American public.

Look, I know that meteorology as a science still has a long way to go.  Weather and climate are vastly complex systems, extremely sensitive to initial conditions, and long-range forecasting is still fraught with inaccuracies.  Even the most highly-trained meteorologists, using the latest computer models and our best understanding of how the science works, still get it wrong sometimes.

But damn it all, it's still better than magic formulas in black tin boxes in Dublin, New Hampshire.

Backfires and improprieties

If there is one cognitive bias that makes me want to punch a wall, it's the backfire effect.

The backfire effect is a well-studied psychological tendency wherein people with strong opinions on a subject are presented with a logical, rational, fact-supported argument against what they believe in.  The result?  Those people double down on their original opinion.  In other words: given evidence against what people believe, they will believe it even more strongly.

Take, for example, something I've discussed more than once in this blog: anthropogenic climate change.  The data and the jury are both in.  The world is, on the average warming up, and this is due to human activity, especially the burning of fossil fuels.  This warm-up has destabilized the climate, resulting in the worst drought California has seen in recorded history, two years of record high temperatures in Alaska, and two consecutive winters where the northeastern and north central United States have been punished by a chunk of Arctic air that has been cut loose and sent southward by a meander in the jet stream, resulting in a series of snowstorms that buried Boston under eight feet of snow in the last four weeks.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

So there's no real doubt about all this any more.  But that doesn't mean there's not doubters, because that's not the same thing, apparently.  And we got a nasty dose of the backfire effect, apropos of said doubters, just in the last couple of days, with the announcement that one of the most prominent climate change deniers, Dr. Wei-Hock (Willie) Soon, has received a huge percentage of his funding from the petroleum industry...

... without disclosing that information in his scientific papers.

In scientific circles, this is known rather euphemistically as an "impropriety."

And we're not talking about small amounts of money, either.  Soon received a total of $1.2 million from the fossil-fuels industry, including $409,000 from Atlanta-based Southern Company, which has invested heavily in coal-fired electrical plants -- and which sponsors an anti-climate-change lobby in Washington, D.C.  Then we have the $230,000 Soon got from none other than the Koch brothers.  Additionally, he has been heavily funded by Donors Trust, an Alexandria (Virginia)-based funds transfer outfit that takes anonymous donations and passes them on to (mostly conservative) causes.

Can you say "conflict of interest," children?

I knew you could.

Soon, who is employed by the Smithsonian Institution, is likely to find himself in completely merited hot water over this.  W. John Kress, interim undersecretary for science at the Smithsonian, said about Dr. Soon's actions, "I am aware of the situation with Willie Soon, and I’m very concerned about it.  We are checking into this ourselves."

So this seems like something that would be hard for the deniers to explain away.  For years they've argued that all you have to do is "follow the money" -- that the climatologists are biased to find evidence for climate change where there is none, because that's the way they get funding.  The knife should cut both ways, shouldn't it?

Apparently not.  The screaming denier-machine swung into action almost immediately, with a slimy little smear piece appearing in Breitbart.com that made it look like Dr. Soon was the victim.  Referring to the people who accept that human activity is causing the planet to warm up as the "lickspittle posse" -- a phrase that may win the award for throw-up-a-little-in-your-mouth metaphor of the year -- the author, James Delingpole, portrays Dr. Soon as a beleaguered champion of the truth, fighting against what amounts to the environmental mafia.  But after blathering on in this fashion for a while, he goes on to say something that's actually kind of interesting:

I spoke to Soon last night. He told me that of course he receives private funding for his research: he has to because it’s his only way of making ends meet, especially since the Alarmist establishment launched its vendetta against him when, from 2009 onwards, he became more outspoken in his critiques of global warming theory. 

Harvard-Smithsonian strove to make his life harder and harder, first by banning him from working on anything even remotely connected with issues like climate change or CO2, then by moving his office away from the astrophysics department to a remote area Soon calls Siberia.

Of course Dr. Soon is allowed to accept private funding.  What is required by scientific ethical standards, however, is that he admit the source of those funds up front in his papers, which he has not done, and now he got caught.  But what's more interesting, here, is that Delingpole inadvertently points out one of the central problems with all of this.

Soon isn't a climatologist.  He's an astrophysicist.

Okay, it's vaguely connected, I suppose, because his claim all along has been that any warming is due to an increase in the radiant energy the Earth receives from the Sun.  But if you're trying to find the errors in the climate model, wouldn't you ask a climatologist to do it?

Oh, wait.  The climatologists are all in the pockets of Greenpeace.  Never mind that Soon is in the far, far deeper pockets of the Koch brothers.  That, apparently, is irrelevant.

But the overall effect is to make the deniers deny even harder, as the world warms up further (c.f. a Scientific American article in which we find out that there have been zero months since February 1985 that have had average temperatures below the overall 20th century average), and the climate continues to oscillate wildly, and we continue to do absolutely nothing about it.

Easier, I suppose, to accept the status quo than to change your habits.

Or your opinions.

Heavy weather

I find it puzzling how few people actually understand weather.

Partly, this puzzlement is because I've always found it completely fascinating.  I spend a lot of time on Weather Underground and the NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) sites, with the result that I frequently update my wife on the status of weather systems in Nebraska.  (Her stock response: "That's nice, dear.")

I cannot, for example, fathom how people wouldn't be intensely curious about videos like the recent time-lapse series taken of a supercell system in Wyoming, which all of you should watch right now:

What surprises me is how few people get beyond the "Oh, wow," stage with all of this.  I know that the first time I saw a photograph of a supercell -- which ranks right up there with a dry microburst as the most bizarre weather phenomenon I've ever heard of -- I immediately thought, "What could cause something like that?"  And asking this question led me to all sorts of cool places, like atmospheric convection and adiabatic cooling and evaporative cooling and wind shear.

Now I realize that this stuff gets complex fast.  To quote Garrison Keillor, "Intelligence is like four-wheel drive.  It enables you to get stuck in even more remote places."

But it's still awesome.  And weather is, after all, ubiquitous.  How you could be immersed in something all the time, and not want to know how it works, is mystifying to me.

All of this comes up because of two stories this week, both of which never would have been more than meteorological curiosities if it weren't for the fact that people tend not to know much about the weather phenomena that surround them all day, every day.  The first, which involves an admittedly odd cloud pattern called a "hole-punch cloud," or "fallstreak hole," had people speculating that the seeming "hole in the sky" (check the link for photographs) was one of the following:

1. A wormhole.
2. A flaw in the Matrix.
3. A sign that we're all living inside some kind of self-contained dome, à la The Truman Show, and the hole was sort of like the can light that fell out of the sky at the beginning of the movie.
4. A gap through which an angel was about to arrive.  Why an angel couldn't just come through the clouds without there being a hole, given that clouds are basically big blobs of fog, I don't know.
5. A portal to a different dimension.

Of course, all of the furor was founded on the fact that hole-punch clouds have a perfectly natural explanation, usually that an airplane (or, much less commonly, a meteor) disrupted what was uniform cloud cover, leaving a temporary hole through the clouds.

No Matrix, wormhole, or angels required.

Second, we had a story from the wonderful site Doubtful News that blamed the unusual (and destructive) rains that have hit Serbia in the past week on none other than...

... HAARP.

Yes, we have not seen the last of the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program, that favorite bête noire of conspiracy theorists -- despite the fact that HAARP closed last year and is currently being dismantled.  It's been blamed for everything from tsunamis to earthquakes to tornadoes to hurricanes, and now... floods:

Many of my contacts in Serbia have spoken of whispered accusations that the unprecedented flooding and unusual weather patterns in the last few years have something to do with the US’s HAARP system. According to one website: “A Serbian journalist was advised not to write about a HAARP installation near Belgrade. After series of texts regarding HAARP antenna system near Barajevo (Belgrade municipality) and application of this ELF system in Serbia the journalist of newspaper Pravda has received a phone call on Monday evening around 10PM from unlisted phone number. The voice on other side of the line gave the journalist a “friendly advice” to stop writing on HAARP...” 

Would it be surprising if the US, after unleashing neo-Nazis in Ukraine, unleashed flooding in Serbia? Those in the know would probably say no.

 And there's a reason for that, you know?  Like the fact that HAARP couldn't even cause floods when it was running, much less now, when it isn't?

Of course, every time there's a catastrophe, people want an Explanation, not just an explanation.  It's not enough just to talk about weather systems and frontal boundaries and atmospheric moisture; there's got to be more.

But dammit, it'd be nice if people would start with the weather systems and frontal boundaries, rather than starting from ignorance and going downhill from there.  If you want to comment intelligently on anything, it helps to know some of the science behind it first.

Okay, I'll calm down, now.  Back to my happy place.  NOAA.  I see that there's a low-pressure center over Manitoba at the moment.  Isn't that cool?  Isn't it?

That's nice, dear.

The polar vortex agenda

Dear readers,

Before I get to today's post, I want to point out something that you probably have already noticed -- a new feature in the upper right-hand corner of Skeptophilia labeled "Donate."  If you're a regular reader -- or even if you're not, and just want to support the effort and time it takes to bring posts to you six days a week that leave you thinking or laughing or both -- then consider making a donation!  You can contribute securely through PayPal, and your (much appreciated) donation will help assure that we will be able to continue to provide you with skeptical content for a long time to come.

And now, back to our regularly scheduled programming.

cheers,

Gordon

*************************************

Rush Limbaugh is kind of predictable.  All you have to do is watch the weather map. If we have any sort of anomalous weather, you can guarantee that a day or two later he will be drawing on his skills as a climatologist to inform his loyal listeners that whatever it is had nothing to do with global warming.  It's just like clockwork, sort of like intestinal gas after a meal at Taco Bell.

This time, though, he's gone a step farther.  The piece of the polar vortex that has been spinning its way across the northern United States, causing widespread damage, thousands of school closings, and wind chills in some places lower than -50 Fahrenheit, is not real, Limbaugh says.  It's all a hoax.  And guess who is perpetrating this hoax?  You'll never guess.

The liberals.  Told you you'd never guess.

Here's what he had to say in Monday's Rush Limbaugh Show:

Do you know what the polar vortex is? Have you ever heard of it? Well, they just created it for this week...  Now, in their attempt, the left, the media, everybody, to come up with a way to make this sound like it's something new and completely unprecedented, they've come up with this phrase called the "polar vortex."  If you've been watching television, they've created a graphic, all the networks have, and it basically consists of a view of the planet if you are right above the North Pole. They put this big purple blob, or blue blob, or red blob, depending on the network you're looking at, over the entire North Pole, and they call that the polar vortex. It actually sounds like a crappy science fiction movie to me, but anyway, that's what they're calling it.

We are having a record-breaking cold snap in many parts of the country.  And right on schedule the media have to come up with a way to make it sound like it’s completely unprecedented.  Because they’ve got to find a way to attach this to the global warming agenda, and they have.  It’s called the ‘polar vortex.’  The dreaded polar vortex.”

Liberals are in the middle of a hoax, they’re perpetrating a hoax, but they’re relying on their total dominance of the media to lie to you each and every day about climate change and global warming.  So they created the polar vortex, and the polar vortex, something’s happened, and that cold air which normally stays is in the North Pole, something’s happening, something deeply mysterious and perhaps tragic is happening.

Whatever it is that keeps the polar vortex vortexed in the Arctic Circle is vanishing, and that cold air is coming to us. Normally it stays up there. But now it's down here. How did it get here? That's the deepening mystery. That is the crisis. That is what is man-made. Man is destroying the invisible boundaries that keeps that air up there. How did it get cold in previous winters? Well, it got cold in previous winters, but, see, as far as most people are concerned, this is as cold as it's ever been in their lives. Well, but, Snerdley, I'm just telling you their technique. Forget truth. The truth and the Democrat Party, the truth and the American left never intersect.

My point is you have a lot of people who are believing that this is as cold as it’s ever been.  You might think that flies in the face of global warming.  Ah, ah, ah, ah.  Global warming’s not climate change, and we, folks, are causing all of this, you must understand.  The hoax continues.

So, let's analyze this, shall we?

First of all, let's look at his first contention, which is that the "polar vortex" was just invented by liberals last week to scare everyone, for reasons unknown.  Strange, then, that the term was first used 150 years ago to describe the Arctic air circulation (Littell's Living Age, #495, 12 November 1853, p. 490), and has been standard terminology in climate science ever since.  All you have to be able to do is to use Wikipedia -- something that apparently is outside of Mr. Limbaugh's rather limited skill set -- to find out that the reduced ice coverage in the Arctic Ocean, coupled with weakening of the polar air circulation, has been known for years to cause "meanders" in the jet stream that sometimes cause whirling blobs of cold air to break loose from the main polar vortex -- just like what happened this week.

But let's consider other sources.  They had a lot to say about the phenomenon this week over at ClimateCentral.org, where in an article on this week's weather we read:

The forecast high temperature in Fairbanks, Alaska, on Monday was in the 20s Fahrenheit — warmer than many locations in Georgia and Alabama. That fits in with the so-called “Arctic Paradox” or “Warm Arctic, Cold Continents” pattern that researchers first identified several years ago. Such patterns bring comparatively mild conditions to the Arctic while places far to the south are thrown into a deep freeze...  The warmth in the Arctic made headlines in early December when the temperature hit 39°F in Prudhoe Bay, north of the Arctic Circle. That was the highest December temperature on record there since at least 1968, according to the National Weather Service.

Even more interesting was what Rick Grow, writing for The Washington Post, had to say:

Large atmospheric waves move upward from the troposphere — where most weather occurs — into the stratosphere, which is the layer of air above the troposphere. These waves, which are called Rossby waves, transport energy and momentum from the troposphere to the stratosphere. This energy and momentum transfer generates a circulation in the stratosphere, which features sinking air in the polar latitudes and rising air in the lowest latitudes. As air sinks, it warms. If the stratospheric air warms rapidly in the Arctic, it will throw the circulation off balance. This can cause a major disruption to the polar vortex, stretching it and — sometimes — splitting it apart.

What is unusual about this week's event is that instead of just spawning a minor meander, nearly the entire polar vortex came unhinged and started drifting south -- which you can see on the following map, showing that while Chicago was in the deep freeze, northern Labrador was experiencing far warmer than normal conditions:

 

What I find interesting about this is that when we set record high temperatures -- like we did two weeks ago in the Northeast, when in my usually chilly home town we shattered all previous records for that day with a balmy 67 Fahrenheit -- the climate change deniers point out that as everyone knows, there's a difference between weather and climate.  That was just a single day's high, nothing to be concerned about.  But when we have cold weather, you have bloviating windbags like Mr. Limbaugh ranting about how the icy conditions show that global warming is a hoax.

Sorry, dude, you can't have it both ways.  If you can't use single weather events to support climate change, you can't use single weather events to deny it, either.  But the problem is that then, you're forced to look at trends -- which means that you'd have to be honest and admit that the global average temperature is increasing steadily.  Which is the last thing that Limbaugh and his cadre want to do.

So who is it, exactly, that seems to have no intersection between their agenda and the truth?

As I've said before: to reject the basic tenets of climate change, you have to ignore mountains of hard data from the last fifty years, coupled with the predictions of climate models developed by some of the best climatologists in the world.  Because they have no particular difficulty coming to consensus; well over 90% of climate scientists not only believe that the Earth is warming, they believe that the warm-up is due to human activity, especially the burning of fossil fuels.

The problem is, more people listen to fools like Rush Limbaugh than listen to the scientists, which is exactly what people like him want.  Dumb folks down.  Science is hard, and often confusing; here, let me tell you what to think.  The people who are trying to get you to change your ways are just liars and hoaxers with a secret agenda to destroy the U. S. of A.  It's okay, you can still drive your Hummer around with a clear conscience.

And outside, the wind is still howling, and the weather is becoming more and more unpredictable.  Today, as I write this, it's -4 F.   By Saturday, it's predicted to be 48 F and raining.  In upstate New York, in mid-January.

Liberal agenda, my ass.

Money, bias, and climate science

I've often wished that politics was more frequently informed by good science, but the pessimistic side of me (never very deeply buried) wonders if that is even possible.  There are politicians who understand science, but given the complexity of the situations that lawmakers deal with -- combining the hard facts uncovered by scientific research with the economic and business impacts, considering how any proposed changes would affect the average citizen, and keeping in mind what it takes to get reelected -- it's no wonder that governmental policy often makes a hash out of it.

You need no conspiracies in effect to have that result.  Our government is built in such a way that this is the inevitable outcome.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the current battle over climate change.  You would think that people would see the simple dichotomy between whether climate change is actually happening (something about which climatologists are hardly in doubt) and what, if anything, should be done about it.  It's amazing how few people understand that these two questions aren't the same thing.  I have more than once seen people arguing, with no apparent awareness of a break in the logical chain, that climate change isn't happening because decreasing fossil fuel use would have devastating effects on our economy.

Oh, that it were that simple.  If the world worked that way, I could just state that I didn't believe in my home and car needing expensive maintenance because it's having "devastating effects on my bank account," and they would magically take care of themselves.

Still, the politicization of the climate issue is having tremendous effects on the public perception of what is, at its base, a scientific question.  Interesting, isn't it, that by and large liberals accept that anthropogenic climate change is happening, and conservatives deny it?  You'd think that a scientific conclusion would be based upon the evidence, not on your political party.  And the research is clear; as I mentioned in a recent post, the number of peer-reviewed studies that support climate change outnumber the ones that question it by over 500:1.

A study that was just reviewed in The Guardian points up why that may be.  Over the past ten years, conservative billionaires have funneled over $120 million dollars into think tanks that have only one purpose; to cast doubt in the minds of voters and lawmakers regarding climate change.  [Source]  The two umbrella organizations that oversaw the handling of the funds -- Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund -- spent the money on strategic planning, public disinformation campaigns, and beefing up the coffers of the handful of scientists left who deny that climate change is real.

And the conservatives, with straight faces, accuse the climatologists of being in the pay of environmental organizations.  I wonder who has deeper pockets, Donors Trust or the Sierra Club?

Lest you think that I'm just showing my bias here, take a look at "Plutocracy, Pure and Simple," by George Monbiot.  Starting in 2002, the Republicans recognized that climate change could be used as a wedge issue, and that acknowledging the science was tantamount to political suicide.  Conservative consultant Frank Luntz actually said, "Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly.  Therefore, you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate."  And this script has been followed to the letter.  The think tanks that were funded by Donors Trust, Donors Capital Fund, and the likes of the Koch brothers have generated not only campaigns to raise doubt in the minds of voters, but public school curricula that include explicit statements that whether climate change is happening is "a major scientific controversy."

By my definition, a "controversy" is "something people disagree about."  500:1 in favor hardly qualifies as a "controversy."

But of course, that's not how they want the layperson, the average citizen, to see the situation.  They want the voters to think that the science is uncertain, because if the scientists can't even figure out what's going on, then we sure as hell don't want to give up our gas-guzzling cars and coal-fired power stations. 

I find the whole thing infuriating.  It's not that I don't realize that the profit motive can lead to abuses; money corrupts, and all that sort of thing.  It's more that these wealthy donors and giant money-handling machines are sowing confusion in the minds of the average man and woman -- the people who, above all, need correct information in order to make informed decisions.  And that confusion is leading to all of us, lawmaker and citizen alike, doing nothing, as the world continues to warm, the ice continues to melt, the seas continue to rise.

The result: let's stay with the status quo, even if it marches us right off a cliff.